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And many-many raven used in pvp :D Nice try.

You need to check EHP 89.6k and u use small cap booster. So u lost your cap almost instanlty. And what i said ? "And what you will to use ? Small guns ? Or you lose some low and rig slots for PG mods/rigs?"

Worsen than drake and i didnt make drake with 3x extender wich is not impossible.

But do you know i can fit 3x shield extender to drake which has 29k shield HP and has 100k EHP and 501 DPS without wasting any rig or other slot.
Can shot 3x farter than your harbinger and faster than over 200 m/s.
The drake is overpowered than any BCs when we talking about defensive systems,that's why use drake blobs in null, and other one the 240 hp/sec shield regeneration with a passive drake it's a joke too.
Wait, tell to me, CFC or all other alliances why using drakes and not harbingers ?

Oh come on Pinky, sure you created a brick Harby with ok damage, but what is the range on that? EFT and Pyfa can calculate raw dps for you but do you really have to mess around with graphing that damage to know the advantage of damage over range with HMLs on a Drake?

BTW, here's an easy fix CCP could do right now. Simply give each tier 2 BC the same shield, armor, and structure hp stats as their tier 1 BC counterpart. No messing with slots, hardpoints, or bonuses. Tier 2 would still keep their extra slot, and better ship bonuses, but they would not also have the increased hp advantage. That change alone might breath some new life into tier 1 and HACs, although probably not. Still it's easy to do and hardly an inadvertent game breaker, which happens with buffs mostly anyway.

The range is 10km with short range ammo and 24km with scorch.
The drakes easily can manage this short distances. More EHP, more speed etc.

It's about time the Drake was balanced. It's been overpowered far too long. This kind of says it all: http://www.eve-kill.net/?a=top20

Rank Ships Kills
1 Drake 111831
2 Hurricane 55525
3 Tengu 27439
4 Thrasher 26842
5 Tornado 26645

You can argue and discuss wheather the ship is OP or not but in the end of the day it's hard to refute the cold hard numbers. People aren't stupid they choose the best tool for the job. The Drake has been this tool for a looooong time now.

Quote PinkKnife: The issue is that there need to be trade offs. The drake has none

• I think it's a tradeoff when the Drake tank drops dramatically to fit a webifier
• I think it's a tradeoff to do ~400dps delayed damage at long range (with reduced damage to low sig and fast velocity targets)
• I think it's a tradeoff when you need others to tackle for you
• I think it's a tradeoff when the Drake takes time to reach max velocity and has agility like a brick
• I think it's a tradeoff to have a signature the size of a small battleship

Yes, who would have ever thought the Drake would be usefull for pvp?
CCP know they have to reduce the tank, however they will need to compensate or the Drake will be underpowered. Unbalanced doesn't necesarily mean overpowered in all situations...

Pinky

Cold numbers say everything the provider of them wants to say, or the reader wants to read.

It only says Drakes where involved in 111831 kills, that exactly all it says, not how many drakes are flown ect ect.

That same page also lists the weapons used to make kills, when you ad up the medium weapon systems the difference between them becomes very small.

That could point to the fact that there are very few medium misslile launchers platforms, in comparrisation to Turret platforms.
In fact T1 BC'S (Most used ships in the game) have only 1, where the turrets have atleast 3, for every turret type.

Take the fact that Missles have an entire tree of there own, wich makes it a little harder to step to an other weapon system.

and you get a totaly different picture.

---

Now that said:

they shoud do something about the current situation, but it shouldn't be a simple nerf, as said before, remove the Drake for 2 new ships one made for Heavy assault missiles and one for Heavy missiles.

I would like to see the Drake hull used for a Caldari Navy Ship, it's legendary status should earn it that place.

As well as making T1 Cruiser hulls that are actualy able to carry medium missile launchers without becoming obsolete.

I'll guess we'll see what happens in a year or two, since that time it will take before CCP is getting to BC reballencing.

1 Drake 120743

And numbers just increasing every days.
This numbers is the cold facts.

Drakes don't need a web. Sure it helps to apply DPS, but the strength of the drake wasn't its ability to apply massive dps. As long as the ship is within 75Km you simply chip away at it until it dies, webs or not. Missiles always hit if they are within range so you just have to out last the other ship.

Any DPS > no Dps. How much does that prophecy do at 75km again? 0? Oh well thats because it can fit a web.

Needing others to tackle for you isn't a curse unique to the drake or hell even battlecruisers in general.

Signature size doesn't matter when you out tank anything to begin with. It isn't like you have to dodge all those incoming blaster hits from 50km away.




I would support adding in larger/smaller variants to missile launchers to get different sorts of fits and firing rates. Drones have their own tree, so do turrets, you just don't notice since new players get that tree to some degree already trained.


Having the drake as a navy ship though? What are you smoking.

You joking ? Drakes compared with battleships ? :P
This is your arguments ? LOL

It's time to using noobships thats free compared vs battleships.

Pinky idgi with what are you disagreeing?

Yeah, the Drake is the cheapest of the fleet ship backbone ships. Sure occasionally someone will trot out a cane fleet. Hey I've got no problem as well stripping one of the direct damage bonuses from the cane and replacing it with an indirect damage bonus, optimal, tracking, or falloff. Regardless, you don't seem to disagree that the Drake is unique in it's power/cost/sp. That is the point. That is much of why it is so far out ahead of other ships in usage statistics. Wouldn't the game be better if you did see some Myrmidon and Harby fleets as often? - and if none of those fleets could trully slug it out with BS fleets?

You are however wrong that it is just 250 ship full fleets that use them. They are everywhere in eve combat. Small gangs are also filled with many drakes. People love an oversized tank, and why not. Long gone are the days where guys would show up in their purger rigged bricks expecting to tank in pvp like they do in pve and getting told to go home. However, they do now show up with extender rigged and BCU'd versions and are not told to go home. If you are in a mixed small gang of Canes and Drakes the drake pilots are feeling pretty secure that the cane pilots have a larger chance of going home in a pod than they do. Thus they show up in Drakes.

PinkKnife's point is that noone shows up in a Prophecy despite it's ability to sport a similar beefy tank because in doing so the range and dps is even much more abysmal compared to a Drake. Of course it is a tier 1. But you are the one who posted a brick Harby and said there is no issue here, totally ignoring the lack of range and damave over range on that thing. The Prophecy is similarly gimped. The point is that neither of those ships can do what a Drake does and that is why you do not see any Harby or Proph fleets or even small gangs. You are going to see more Drakes even in small gangs.

As for the range on heavy missiles you seem to agree there is an issue. The only way you get similar range with turret systems is through training tech II gunnery skill tree, which is a longer slog than the missile path of focusing on one weapon size. It seems to me that it could be the skills that are at fault in this. Missiles range skills are 10% per level, the gunnery range skills only 5% per level. Maybe if the skills only provided a 5% boost or only one of them had the 10% boost (probably better to keep the missile speed bonus at 10% per level) there would be less of an issue here.

And yes, if the ship gets a range bonus it does set up a stupid situation where all three Caldari BCs are range focused. I hope they get the eventual rebalancing right. They will have to recognize many things. That resist bonuses are very powerful and active tank bonuses not as much. This game is not an honorable one v one type game. Until they do get around to comprehensive treatment of this ship class they do have an option for interim changes despite Ytterbium's imo unreasonable timidity with such measures. I posted a couple suggestions in an op on a different thread in the test server forum.

Anyway, the point is it should no longer be fleets with backbones of tech III or BS (tech II sub BS being largely now shut out) . . . or the Drake. The skill and isk investment disparity is glaring. Having one ship so overrepresented is not healthy for the game. Unless they want to make all BCs similarly useful and make the sp and isk investment meaningless. But that thankfully does not appear to be the desired outcome.